"Cloquet hated reality but realized it was still the only place to get a good steak," Woody Allen wrote once upon a time. This seems to be our lot, reduced to a comical scale. For as soon as we are born, we have a yawning need. As soon as we grow up, we discover the loss of innocence.

It sounds good, but I'm not so sure anymore about what George Bernard Shaw meant when he said, ''This is a world which our own folly keeps from being a paradise.' There are still natural disasters, floods, fires, mudslides, volcanic activity, earthquakes, tornadoes, tsunamis, etc. It seems to me man would still be catching hell even if we were to all get along, as Rodney King yearned for. Perhaps the presence of these natural disasters alone would be enough to upset the long-sought peace between nations.

No, this isn't a perfect world. If you believe the Bible, the first man, Adam, disobeyed his Creator and died spiritually in that moment. It took him another 900 years for his ticker to go out. Cut off from the perfect nature of God, Adam "sinned," that is, he missed the mark of God's perfect holiness and righteousness and instead sought to create his own happiness. Thus, the Bible labels our inherited dysfunction as sin. Since Adam was our common father, all of humanity was literally in his loins when he fell and thus inherited his sinful nature, that is, his tendency to wildly miss the mark of God's intended plan for us. And since then man has lived increasingly shorter lifespans until recently when science has extended number of years that we will have to wear Depends undergarments.

"The mind is maya." This is the teaching of Hinduism which best describes the lack of perfection we see around us. One of India's greatest spiritual sages, Ramana Maharshi, uttered it. It summarizes the collective mental illness of the human mind. One only need look at the twentieth century to know what I mean.

In Buddhism, the mind in its normal state gives off 'dukkha,' which is suffering, inhumanity, unhappiness. Eventually everyone is bound to encounter it. Madness is seen as characteristic of the human condition.

All of the world's major religions accommodate the inherent proclivity of man to do wrong, to cause suffering, and to suffer. Religion acknowledges that ours is not a perfect world.

Science, too, has come to grips with the limitations of a less-than-perfect world. It has conquered many diseases, broken the genetic code, and even given us an efficient public toilet system. We take for granted a system that enables us to collect and dispose of billions of liters of urine and millions of kilograms of fecal matter per day. In medieval times and even countless centuries before, most people did open defecation. In other areas, however, the efficiency promised by science has only given us more pollution, gridlock, and singles bars.

And so there is in us this inconsolable longing. As parents, we dread the day when our children's innocence will be taken away by the harsh realities of the world, by some slight unintended or not, by a broken heart, or by witnessing some grisly horror firsthand. Neither science or religion can tell us exactly why a day care center full of children goes up in flames, taking the lives of all the children inside.

If you are like most people, you either believe in either religion or science to save us. Regardless of which one you believe, there can be no doubt about the unanswered questions that each poses to us, questions I rather suspect will always remain unanswered until one of them breaks in on us and goes from faith to seeing, from hope to having.

Learn more about this author, Jeffrey Jason Hill.
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